A Walker in the City

Over the past four years, William Helmreich, a sixty-seven-year-old professor of sociology at CUNY, has walked almost every street in New York City: a hundred and twenty thousand blocks, or about six thousand miles. He’s written a book about the effort called “The New York Nobody Knows,” which will be published next month. One recent morning, I met him at the corner of 170th Street and Grand Concourse for a tour of the Bronx. Helmreich is tall and fit, with an unlined face and a crescent-shaped grin. On the phone, he’d asked me to dress inconspicuously—“We’ll be going to some gang-related areas,” he said, “so wear muted colors, shorts, and sneakers”—but the plan backfired, and we dressed identically, in khaki shorts, black sneakers, and washed-out green shirts. “Hey,” he said when we met, “you look great!”

Helmreich is extraordinarily energetic and voluble. “The New York Nobody Knows” is his fourteenth book (he’s also written about ethnic stereotypes, Holocaust survivors, and black militants). “I love the city,” he said as we began walking. “I love to read about the city, to live the city, to walk the city.” During his four years of research, he walked almost every day. “I did it in the morning. I did it in the evening. I did it on the weekends. I did it in the rain, in the snow, in the summer. It came to about thirty-five, forty miles a week, a hundred twenty a month, fifteen hundred a year.” He has a near-photographic memory, and can envision with ease landmarks and parks, the shapes of buildings, the curves of streets.

Helmreich is a great advocate for the Bronx, which he says could be the next Brooklyn—a target, or perhaps a beneficiary, of gentrification. We walked along Grand Avenue near 180th Street, a cheerful neighborhood of small, squared-off row houses, each with a gated driveway and a neatly kept garden. Many of the houses were flying Puerto Rican flags; more Puerto Ricans live in the Bronx than in any other borough. We passed a shady green park. “Is this a war zone?” Helmreich asked. “Is that a disgusting park in the slums? When people get it into their heads that the Bronx isn’t as dangerous as they think it is, everything’s going to change.”

Helmreich’s strategy for walking in strange neighborhoods is to talk to strangers. “If I see some bad-ass dude walking up toward me, I don’t put on my gang face, I don’t try to look tough,” he said. “In fact, I do the opposite. I seek to make eye contact, and as soon as they look at me I say, ‘Hey, buddy, how ya doin’?’ ” People laugh and say things like “O.K., pops.” It helps that Helmreich is both harmless and relentless. In Bronx River Park, at 180th Street and Boston Road, where the Bronx River forms a spectacular waterfall—“the most beautiful waterfall in New York”—he cheerfully badgered a sanitation worker to find out why the park was closed. “Beautiful day,” he said.

“Uh huh,” said the worker.

“Lovely park,” Helmreich continued. “Great work you’re doing here. Looks like you’re making some big changes.” Finally, the man relented: “The fishes are endangered,” he explained, “so they have to make an upstream course, so that they can spawn.” Helmreich made small talk for a few minutes, learning about the man’s home, in another part of the Bronx.

One of Helmreich’s favorite areas is on Charlotte Street, near Minford Place in the South Bronx. In the seventies, the neighborhood was one of the worst slums in America, burned-out and abandoned. Later, it was rebuilt as a model suburb. Today, the houses there have big lawns with picket fences; tall, leafy trees with tweeting birds shade stand-alone mailboxes on posts. Over the roofs, beyond the borders of the neighborhood, tall buildings loom. “Hear those birds?” Helmreich asked, with genuine joy. “It’s an oasis! Don’t stereotype the Bronx!”

It’s difficult, Helmreich told me, to hold in your mind the full range of possibilities on offer in the Bronx. On foot, we explored what he calls “the most dangerous area,” the Fordham neighborhood near Tiebout Avenue. On one deserted block, guarded on both ends by watchful groups of men with walkie-talkies, we looked at a huge gang mural. (“We won’t pause long here,” Helmreich said. “You never know, there could be a shootout at any moment—they’ve got the whole place scoped out. You could be dead in two minutes!”) The mural showed a red heart encircled with a ribbon next to a message in flowing script: “To my beloved husband Wilson—Your love I miss every day of my life. For all I have now is those precious memories that will always be in my heart forever. Your Wife, Mitzi.” Across the street was a fortified house. Every door and window on all three floors was covered with an almost opaque sheeting of bars. The house, Helmreich explained, belonged to the new gang leader—probably a West-African man—who had taken over from Wilson. He learned this history, he said, by asking people who worked for a utility company nearby. It was a desolate, fearful neighborhood, but by walking Helmreich had been able to get over his fear. After the gang mural, he took pains to point out another wall, a few blocks away, on which local students had painted poems. “I love you,” one of them began, “but I cannot speak.” A kid rode by on a unicycle. “Look at that!” Helmreich said. “Life is here!”

Several miles away, in the East Bronx, we visited the Harding Park neighborhood, which Helmreich described as “a Puerto Rican fishing village.” A path led through small houses—sometimes, Helmreich said, there are chickens in the back yards—to the East River, where a family was fishing. (“They saw 9/11 from here,” Helmreich pointed out, an experience that unites even the most far-flung neighborhoods.) In another, ritzier waterfront neighborhood, Edgewater Park, kids played on a small sand beach next to a marina. The only sounds came from seagulls and the wind. Apart from the familiar New York building permits, these neighborhoods seem to have nothing in common with the rest of the city. Still, Helmreich has a theory about what gives New York’s hundreds of communities cohesion: a sense of possibility and pride. “They’re united by the feeling that they live in the world’s greatest city. This is a village, but there’s one thing that’s very important about this village.” He pointed down a narrow street to where a city bus was idling. “That bus brings you to the Empire State Building in forty minutes. It doesn’t do that in other places.”

Helmreich sees gentrification as, in many cases, a positive force. “Most people don’t really know about gentrification,” he said. They only think of the fanciest areas, like Park Slope, where gentrification has had a totalizing character. Having walked and talked through all five boroughs, Helmreich says that he’s seen a widespread, middle-class gentrification, in which current residents often stay on, paying higher rents because they like the changed neighborhood. Sometimes they’re even gentrifiers themselves. By holding the door for a deliveryman, we snuck into an apartment building called The Shakespeare, in Morris Heights, a tough area. Helmreich thinks the building represents “the birth pangs of gentrification” in the West Bronx. We found our way to the building’s gym, where residents were working out on elliptical machines and watching “Days of Thunder” on a flat-screen TV. Students were doing homework in the building’s shared computer lab. “Hey guys,” Helmreich whispered. “Nice building!” All the residents we met were African-American. Helmreich said, “For many people, if you don’t walk New York, and don’t talk to people, you never meet the many black people who live in middle-class communities.”

At the same time, Helmreich is appalled by the arbitrary unevenness of change. We spent a few minutes in Crotona Park, east of Morris Heights. It’s one of New York’s most beautiful parks, with a large lake, a swimming pool, and immaculate tennis courts, where, when we visited, kids were taking lessons. On a walk just one block over, Helmreich once traded words with a group of men dressed in the red clothing associated with the Bloods. (“I asked them, ‘How can I get one of those red jackets?’ and they said, ‘Depends what side you’re on.’ ”) “The kids in the park and those kids are worlds apart,” Helmreich said. Perhaps for the first time that day, he paused. “It’s beyond words.”

Helmreich claims that the best pizza in New York is at Crosby Stop Pizza, in Pelham Bay near the end of the 6 line. Over a large pie, we talked about his childhood. His father had played a game with him called Last Stop. They’d take a random subway line to the end and explore. Sometimes, to go further, they’d take the bus. They did this most weekends, from the time Helmreich was nine until he started high school. Helmreich dedicated “The New York Nobody Knows” to his father, who walked seven miles a day well into his eighties, and who died two years ago, at a hundred and two. In a sense, the book is a return to his youth. On the table, next to his pizza, Helmreich spread out the maps he used during his walks: simple black-and-white photocopies from an atlas, cut down to focus on individual neighborhoods. He picked up a map of Staten Island: it showed a few blocks he hadn’t been able to walk before his publisher’s deadline. Now that the book is done, he said, he plans to walk those blocks. After that, he said, “I might just start over.” He smiled. “I could keep doing this for the rest of my life.”

Photograph: Adger Cowans/Getty

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.